Sex Crimes On Campus

This month, thousands of female students will head for university, but many will become the victims of sexual assault and harassment. Polly Dunbar investigates the alarming rise of college rape culture.

- Polly Dunbar

WHEN SOPHIE*’S FRIENDS SAID goodbye to her after a night out in October 2014, she was standing in a taxi queue. A second-year history student, she had drunk more than usual that night, but her friends assumed she’d get home safely. When she woke up hours later, she was naked in bed with a stranger. When he began having sex with her, she was powerless, unable to stop him.

‘I was so out of it that I could barely speak,’ says Sophie, now 21. ‘I couldn’t process it. I tried to push him off me, but my body felt like it wasn’t working, so I just lay there.’

Later, she thought she may have been drugged. ‘I had no idea what was happening, except for the fact he’d had sex with me and I hadn’t wanted it. In the morning, he was acting like everything was normal. I gathered my things and stumbled home, feeling dirty and sick.

‘I never reported what happened because I thought I wouldn’t be believed. I blamed myself for being so drunk. Ultimately, though, I was physically incapable of consenting to sex, which means I was raped.’

This month, as thousands of women begin university, they face a culture where harassment and assault is rife. According to the National Union of Students, 68 per cent of women have been the victim of sexual harassment on campus. Meanwhile, the most recent of a number of similar cases – that of Brock Turner, the swimmer at Stanford University who was sentenced to just six months in prison (but served only three) for sexually assaulting a woman while she lay unconscious, highlights the even bigger crisis in the US. There, one in five female students are actually sexually assaulted at university.